In three days, I will begin a voyage unlike any I've undertaken. After two days, Robin will be offshore, according to plan, for most of 400 miles, but in waters that are traveled by freighters, tankers, cruise ships, sport fishing vessels, commercial fishing boats and cruisers like I.
While I've sailed the same route before, I've never done it alone. This time, that's what I've chosen to do, and it poses additional risks.
Alone, you have to keep watch all the time and sneak in sleep when you can in 20-minute intervals. That means that after a couple of days, I'll have been deprived of deep sleep and my body will want to seize slumber despite my efforts. Keeping watch will be a trial.
Also there will be no one else to help out should a problem arise requiring more strength than I can muster.
I've faced these issues before racing to Bermuda. The difference is the presence of more traffic and -- I have to admit it -- three more years of aging.
In view of these risks, I'm forced to contemplate umanageable situations, ones where I fail to survive. In doing so, I've confronted the question: What have I left undone.
I've tried to tell everyone around me how important they are to me, but perhaps I haven't done that well enough. So, to Monica and the rest of my family and friends, here's a blanket I-love-you. My three children, each of my eight grandchildren, my sister and cousins I all care for deeply. So too the many close friends I've made.
What else is undone?
I've never sat down and explained what I've learned so far. And that, too, is extremely important to me, and so I'll attempt to do that now.
What I've learned is that there is no absolute right or wrong. There is no good or bad, except in how a thing or event affects an individual.
All the time we spend cussing at our misfortunes, railing against the fates, being spiteful toward those who have hurt us is wasted. Completely and utterly wasted.
In this world, absolutely everything has a purpose, was designed for a purpose, whether we like it or not. In this universe, the designer made no mistakes.
This is not theology, I assure you. It is seven decades of observation of nature, the only reality we have, the only source of information from which we can acquire knowledge.
Fifty years ago, roughly, an image entered my thoughts. It was of a magnificent oak tree, towering above all the other life in the forest, spreading its branches as a tycoon extends his grasp, consuming and consuming nutrients from the soil and sun so that it can grow even more and the shadow of its leaves, sucking in all the benefits of the sun, deprives the life below, stifling all other growth.
Imagine that this tree, with all its advantages, could prosper indefinitely. What would be the result?
Quite simply, it would consume until no other organism had anything on which to live. It would snuff out the competition, dominate completely. And then stand alone, with nothing left to feed its enormity.
But nothing in the universe that we know could do that. The grand oak spreads its branches, but in doing so it gives the wind greater and greater leverage. In time, a branch will snap, a splintery wound will appear. That wound will become diseased, and the disease will follow the oak's vascular system, transporting rot where it goes.
A storm will take off a larger branch, and another will go, too, until the once dominant tree, with rot at its core, will fall completely to the ground. There, its dead hulk will rot and thus provide nutrition for new, vibrant life.
Like the oak, every organism, from microbes to monkeys, from nasturtiums to nations, from grandfathers to galaxies, possesses the seeds of its own destruction.
This is the perfection of the universe.
Pick a disease, any one of them, that might take you down and curse it and say that your god never meant this to happen to you. You of course waste your time. Your god, your creator, created that disease as part of the intricate system that both supports life and takes it away.
Pick an insect, the grossest bug in your world, and look for ways to destroy it. That's okay for you, but it's lousy for the insect. Pick a human behavior -- let's say global warming, a fine example -- and call it immoral.
To your creator, there's nothing immoral about global warming. It is but one way we humans have found, among the many tools provided us, to assure that our dominance will not continue forever.
The pattern is obvious everywhere you look. I think I first started looking after I heard the word homocentric used to describe man's vision of himself as the center of the universe.
I didn't recognize it at the time, but John Lennon had it figured out when he wrote his song Imagine.
The problem with this reality is that if embraced by our fellow humans as a license to take advantage of other organisms, our society would fall apart. I could go on with many words about this subject alone.
Morality is a "good" thing for the human race. Murder and crimes of similar degree are "bad" for humans. I would not be in favor of laws that permitted unbridaled behavior among members of the human race. But laws are not an antidote to our destructive seeds. We possess them, and they will be used, by us or by other organisms.
I take comfort  in understanding the situation. My understanding doesn't relieve me of the universal dread among organisms about their coming demise. The comfort comes from understanding that the world makes complete sense, always.